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Watching Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation and Olivier Assayas' Demonlover, both opening this month, you might think you're at the center of the world, no matter that the former is a dreamy meditation on entrapment in a foreign culture and the latter a cerebral cyberthriller. Their sensibilities have little in common, yet each movie is plugged into the very heart of newness, with its cosmic fears, its rogue desires, its existential dread.

Lost in Translation is a mood piece as lyrical as Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (2000). Charlotte, an aimless recent Yale graduate (drolly played by Scarlett Johansson), has been temporarily abandoned by her photographer husband to wander the mausoleum-like Park Hyatt Tokyo. The neon fantasia outside it pulses with who-knows-what energies, but the jetlagged girl--a reservoir of needs she herself can't fathom--mostly lolls in her room, lying or jumping on her bed, smoking and thinking.

Also sleepless in Tokyo is Bob Harris (Bill Murray), a jaded American movie star in town to shoot a whiskey commercial, the director of which barks his commands like a Toshiro Mifune samurai. Phoning or faxing from home, Bob's wife has no less an alienating effect on him, demanding he consult with her on fabric colors. He misses his children, but after 25 years, his marriage is stale.

Though respect or diffidence stops Charlotte and Bob from having an affair, they become close after meeting in a bar. Roaming beyond the hotel, they find themselves at a party--Bob's karaoke version of Roxy Music's "More Than This" is pregnant with meaning--at a strip club, on the streets, in taxis. Charlotte falls asleep; he carries her to her room and chastely tucks her in. Later she sulks when she discovers he has slept with a bar singer.

Some psychologists reckon it takes 20 seconds to fall in love, and Coppola nails the ebb and flow of emotion that follows that cathexis, even as it drifts up a blind alley. She has described Lost in Translation as a valentine to Tokyo, but it is love--unspeakable, untranslatable, taboo--that is found and lost here, "love that lay too deep for kissing," as the poet John Betjeman put it. This is the romantic uranium that Coppola's stunning film mines.

Demonlover baffled many critics when it played at Cannes last year because, two-thirds in, it slips its narrative leash and dives into the unconscious mind of industrial saboteur Diane (Connie Nielsen), whose chilly demeanor conceals the conflicted soul of a praying mantis--cum-sex-torture victim. And why can't the modern female business executive be both? As if she has any choice--as if any of us have any control over our media-stoked fantasies of tyranny or abasement.

After eliminating fellow executive Karen, Diane spearheads their conglomerate's acquisition of a Tokyo anime production house, intending to broker its 3-D porno mangas to an L.A. distributor, demonlover.com. Because Diane is actually working for a rival distributor, however, she leaks to her boss the potentially deal-scuppering news that Demonlover peddles an Internet torture site. The corporate skulduggery plays out in vicious cat-fights between Diane, Karen's angry assistant Elise (Chloe Sevigny), and Demonlover's hilariously cynical mover and shaker Elaine (Gina Gershon).

Lara Croft is disempowered here when Elaine admits Demonlover has pirated the Tomb Raider character for a porn site. When Columbia has wrung all the chemistry it can from the current Charlie's Angels team, it should turn the franchise over to Nielsen, Sevigny, and Gershon, who could rip the Girl Scout trio to shreds. Demonlover's experimental logic critiques--as Assayas told Cinema Scope magazine--"the social role of conventional dramaturgy today ... in mainstream Hollywood films, TV, or in independent film ... to simplify the world, and somehow to stop us from understanding what is going on."

Pitched as a storm warning about these restrictive codes, the Internet, and global capitalism, Demonlover--analogous to William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition--spirals from sleek techno-thriller into a coruscating neo-noir of shimmering surfaces, shifting identities, and reverse role-playing. Like videogame players, we get to choose what "happens" to Diane in her guises as Lara Croft manque, cat burglar (invoking Assayas' Irma Vep, 1996), submissive assistant, coyly sadistic date, assassin, and electrocuted bondage doll. A coda shows a Midwestern adolescent watching some or all of this while he does his homework. We're all connected, the film implies, and one day we may wish we weren't.

Graham Fuller is Interview's Film Writer at Large.